Oppo Find X7 Ultra review: two zoom scopes on a real S24 Ultra killer

Oppo is once again going with the unique two-tone natural material look for the Find X7 Ultra. The Oppo Find X6 Pro earned our Best Phone Backs award last year and its successor is no exception with its beautiful two-tone rear that evokes leather and metal impressions. This time around, the phone comes in three coordinated two-tone color schemes - Ocean Blue, Sepia Brown, and Tailored Black - for added variety to match everyone's taste.

The leathery material offers great traction in the hand and a warmer feel than your average phone back. Coupled with the curved front display, it makes for one very easy to grab and operate with one hand phone, more so since the big and round Hasselblad camera island is centered so that your fingers don't get in the way of a good photo, while the top-to-bottom weight distribution is rather balanced as well.

The record-breaking Oppo display line is present on the Find X7 Ultra, complete with 4,500 nits of peak brightness, granular 1Hz-120Hz refresh rate, and all the Dolby Vision HDR certification your heart desires. Oppo calibrates each panel individually to give you the utmost in color presentation to be worthy of the DSLR-style camera kit on the back and its new HyperTone Image Engine.

The reason that you see a discrepancy between the announced 4500 nits vs 2400 nits of peak brightness of the Find X7 Ultra and the Galaxy S24 Ultra, respectively, is the way that the companies measure those levels. 

While Samsung cites 2600 nits of peak brightness, it measures it at a higher APL level than the BOE screen on the Oppo, so our display benchmark equipment clocked a slightly higher typical brightness on the S24 Ultra. In reality, both displays offer outstanding outdoor visibility aided by their record low reflection rates.

When it comes to color credibility and presentation, Oppo definitely has the upper hand before most other flagship phone displays out there, including the S24 Ultra and iPhone 15 Pro Max. 

The per-unit panel calibration that Oppo does in the factory takes only a few seconds per phone, but in return brings breathtaking Delta values that ensure natural or vivid color schemes that are extremely close to the respective wide or standard color reference gamut. In other words, it's a phone for online shopping and picture-peeping, as well as a colorific video projector.

Expanding on its all-main camera philosophy, Oppo introduces not one or two but a Quad Main Camera 50MP system on the Find X7 Ultra, with a unique two periscope zoom kits that each sport 50MP sensors, too.

Compare that to the puny 10MP telephoto and periscope sensors on the Galaxy S23 Ultra, and you'll see why Samsung upped the ante to the same 50MP sensor, but only on one of the S24 Ultra zoom cameras this year. 

Our direct video comparison of the Find X7 Ultra against the Galaxy S24 Ultra picture and video samples below shows that Samsung produces the flashier, more crowd pleasing colors and warmer tones, whereas the natural Hypertone HDR would appeal more to photography purists.

Still, the Oppo Find X7 Ultra manages to beat the Galaxy S24 Ultra in many situations when portraits and zoom shots, especially low-light ones, are involved, as you can see from the quick samples below.

The other standout photography specs on what is already one of the best camera phones in 2024 are the second generation Sony LYT-900 1-inch sensor of the main shooter and the custom 50MP Sony LYT-600 sensor used for the ultra-wide camera.

Add to these the largest periscope camera zoom sensor on any phone - a 50MP 1/1.56" Sony IMX890 sensor - and the 50MP 1/2.51" Sony IMX858 at the end of the 6x periscope zoom lens, and the Find X7 Ultra becomes the ultimate versatile shooting machine.

Its low-light prowess now spans the range of 14mm telemacro to 270mm equivalent focal lengths with equal quality, aided by the new HyperTone Image Engine. The AI-powered HyperTone system aims to end the unnatural looking HDR photos that so many computational photography efforts now churn out. Oppo says that HyperTone "safeguards photo integrity, preserving highlights, shadows and mid-tones with a natural look," and the Find X7 Ultra camera samples below prove its point.

Needless to say, the fullest high-quality zoom range on any phone also brings the ability to make stunning portraits and macro shots. The Find X7 Ultra’s Portrait Mode increases the available focal lengths to four - at 23mm, 44mm, 65mm, and 135mm - each "calibrated to a different Hasselblad lens, producing cinematic bokeh with foreground and background depth" that can isolate the subject down to a single hair. Oppo's Hasselblad Portrait Mode is "also incredibly respectful of individual differences" now, faithfully representing skin hues and facial features at up to 30 feet from the subject.

Last but not least, all that incredible phone camera engineering comes with the new Hasselblad Master Mode for advanced manual controls over ISO, shutter speed, EV, focus, and white balance, as well as saturation, contrast, sharpness, and even vignette control, tuned to the experience with the iconic Hasselblad X2D 100C camera results. In the new Master Mode, the "discerning professional photographers" can now capture in a new RAW MAX1 format with 13 dynamic range stops, and a whopping 16-bit color depth in the BT2020 color space.

We put the Find X7 Ultra camera through our benchmark paces and it indeed scored up with the best in our database, including the iPhone 15 Pro Max and Galaxy S24 Ultra, with a total score in the top percentile.

Video

Both our camera benchmark test and the wild cat video sample below show that the Find X7 Ultra's 4K video prowess falls just short of the top-end performers like the iPhone 15 Pro Max in that respect. Stabilization and color representation are great with only the transition between the zoom range stops that could be smoother. That could be addressed with an update, though, as a similar one is rolling out to previous Oppo flagships.

And a quick comparison with a 4K video in the same "lunch with wildlife" conditions coming from Samsung's Galaxy S24 Ultra below.

We have rigorously tested the camera on the Oppo Find X7 Ultra and above you can see the results of those tests. We carefully measure the performance of all cameras in various test scenes, ranking the performance across important metrics like exposure, subject exposure, color accuracy, detail, artifacts and more. We do these tests for both photos and videos. 

You can learn more about our PhoneArena Camera Score testing protocol here.

 

Performance and software

As can be seen from the benchmark scores above, the Oppo Find X7 Ultra performance is in line with the other flagship Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 phone in the ranking here - the Galaxy S24 Ultra - while it beats the iPhone 15 Pro Max and its powerful A17 Pro chipset in the graphics department. Despite all that GPU power, the battery life doesn't take a hit and the Oppo finished neck and neck with the iPhone in our 3D gaming battery benchmark test.

When it comes to battery life, the Oppo Find X7 Ultra excels in the video streaming test and gives way only to the iPhone 15 Pro Max and its integrated Safari experience in the web browsing test. Thus, you can rest assure that this powerful flagship will get you through a day of heavy usage or give you a weekend of light interaction away from the charger.

What's more, it nearly matches the iPhone's 3D gaming battery life which is not an easy feat to achieve given the holistic interaction between Apple's homebrew GPU and tailored software that only iOS-laden phones can pull off.

All the record-breaking camera and display specs that Oppo managed to cram in the ultimate Find X7 Ultra flagship come at a price of a bit over $900 for the 16GB/512GB version.

This is way lower than the equivalent Galaxy S24 Ultra pricing but Oppo is still exploring whether it makes sense to take the phone to the global market and how to price it compared to Samsung's pride and joy. 

Even if the Find X7 Ultra cost is only slightly lower than the tags of its main competitors - the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra and Apple iPhone 15 Pro Max - it would be with a very good reason.

Oppo's 2024 flagship has one of the best camera and display sets in the industry, not to mention all of its other virtues such as fast performance, excellent battery life, or ergonomic design that emerged during our review process.